


take me back to the start

by disasteratsea



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, romance is minor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-24
Updated: 2014-09-24
Packaged: 2018-02-18 14:46:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2352158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disasteratsea/pseuds/disasteratsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha's journey to find her past isn't exactly happy fun times. </p><p>It made sense, she thought, that it would end where it all began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take me back to the start

It made sense, she thought, that it would end where it all began. Her vision was blurring at the edges, her breathes coming painfully sharp even as she tried to slow them. This would be it, everyone had their time, at least she had made a good run of it. She’s not naïve enough to think that the nightmare would end with her, but at least this place would.

She hopes it all burns.

=

There were enough gaps in Natasha’s memories that she figured if you gathered all of the fractured pieces and stuck them together you could probably find a whole person in there.

She doesn’t talk about it and it doesn’t bother her anymore that she can perfectly and persistently perform thirty-two fouettẻs en tournant without ever taking a lesson in ballet that she can recall.

She is an expert in multiple forms of combat and martial arts, is fluent in eight languages, can break her way into any system without actually knowing How, or Why, or When.

The knowledge is all there, it’s just the memory that isn’t.

She’s not a robot, she knows that she had to have learned these things, knows there are broken and missing pieces in her head. It’s suited her just fine so far, Natasha uses the knowledge as she requires it and ignores the nagging in her mind that says that it isn’t normal.

She decided a long time ago not to scratch that itch, it only leads to pain.

It doesn’t really start to bother her until people start asking questions.

=

“Where the hell did you even learn Latin anyway?” Tony asks in the lab, elbow deep in some contraption or another.

She had only come down because whatever he was doing had caused a power surge throughout the building.

The only response Natasha has is to smile and tap her nose with her index finger.

It’s a secret, she teases.

Hell if I know, she thinks.

=

Bruce mentions having studied aikido in Brazil so Natasha offers to practice with him.

In all honesty, the thought of coming face to face with the Hulk again terrifies her, it likely always will. He’s not an enemy she can manipulate or lure, he is rage and brute, uncontrolled strength she isn’t equipped to deal with. The Hulk is completely unpredictable. Bruce, though, Bruce is a pretty nice guy.

Natasha likes Bruce and she thinks maybe if she can gain his trust the Hulk won’t be so quick to smash her to a pulp.

Somehow she ends up teaching him other techniques for incapacitating assailants with nonlethal force and Bruce comments that she must have had a good teacher.

There’s nothing to say to that really, she doesn’t know who taught her.

=

There’s an instant connection with the Winter Soldier when Steve brings him to the tower.

When he spars, when he handles a weapon, he does so with expertize. He’s amazingly skilled, so it comes as shock that other than all of his abilities he doesn’t really know or understand anything else.

Like her, the Winter Soldier knows how to do things but not How that came to be.

He knows without knowing.

Natasha can look at him and know how he will move next, and he can counter her every move when they spar with such an ease that it infuriates her. When they spar it feels familiar when it shouldn’t.

The familiarity of it knots her stomach and gives her a prickling feeling somewhere behind her eyes.

That scares her more than the thought of him trying to kill her again.

=

“Somebody likes you.” Clint’s singsong voice is truly awful. Natasha is fully aware that it’s awful on purpose because Clint likes to test people sometimes.

“Everyone likes me, I’m likeable. Some would say downright charming.”

His little smiles turns a bit manic, he does like when she plays along. “Don’t play coy with me; you know what I’m talking about.”

She does know. Clint’s not nearly the fool he lets on and he know her better than anyone else does; other than the Winter Soldier, apparently. This is exactly what he’s talking about.

He may be asking in a playful roundabout way but Natasha can see the concern there.

She’s been off balance for weeks; ever since Steve had talked her into helping him with Bucky.

Steve says Bucky’s been doing a lot better, thinks sparring with her has really done him some good. He thinks Bucky likes her.

The Winter Soldier – no, Bucky –sometimes looks at her with confusion.

Maybe it feels familiar to him too.

=

There have always been the dreams that have Natasha waking up in a cold sweat. People and places that she thinks are important but barely recognizes.

In the dreams she knows them but they’re gone when she wakes up.

The feeling of loss after the dreams is suffocating.

=

Clint Barton and coffee have gone hand in hand since before she joined up with SHIELD, back when he himself was on their hit list. For this Natasha would be eternally grateful, because she could always count on Clint when she needed a caffeine boost.

They were both used to having a minimal amount of sleep but lately Natasha had been more tired than she had been since she had been on her own and had a target painted on her back.

“Maybe you’re getting sick?” He doesn’t sound like he believes it at all.

Natasha doesn’t get sick. She hasn’t had so much as a cold in five years.

It’s made her very irritable of late. Tony had been getting on her nerves in particular, but even Cap had managed gain her wrath, by being really nice and considerate and telling her she should take it easy until she felt better.

“I think its boredom. How long has it been since we had an actual mission, a year?” She’s too tired to come up with anything else. Hopefully everyone will drop it.

Maybe she’ll see about taking a fake vacation and doing some covert work.

=

After a cryptic message from Fury leads to another which leads to another, Natasha is led to a secret SHIELD base that doesn’t exist that she’s never heard about.

Nick’s just full of surprises isn’t he?

“Sonovabitch.”

If Natasha has ever felt more betrayed it would have to have been in one of her missing pieces. Phil Coulson is alive, has been for almost two years.

He at least has the decency to look sheepish. “Agent Romanoff.” Phil welcomes, rocking back on his heels. “Welcome to the Playground.”

That’s it? Really? She should have known better than to expect a grand theatrical reunion. Phil was always good at keeping it cool. Clearly she’s been hanging around with the other Avengers for too long. With them everything is dramatic. Even when they had gathered again after the initial attack on New York there had been explosions in the background. She didn’t think Thor was even capable of making a normal entrance.

“Agent Coulson.” She greets on her way in.

Phil’s got himself a new team that he’s been running around with. Melinda May comes as no surprise, Grant Ward having been Hydra all along does.

Then again, Jasper Sitwell had been Hydra too, and he had been a good agent, amiable even. He was a friend of Phil’s too, it must’ve stung to find out.

“You seem tired.” Phil comments.

“You do too.”

=

Pepper had made her promise to stay in touch. “Call me! And email me!”

She had conceded, if only to stop Pepper worrying over her.

“I’m sure you’ll be too busy keeping Tony out of trouble to even notice I’m gone.”

They think she’s taking some time off.

She calls them less often than Pepper likes as the months pass.

Every time she calls Steve she needles him about his love life.

“Hey, what’s with you?” He hadn’t responded the way he usually does, he’s being too quiet.

Bucky’s completely shut himself away, he tells her. As his memory of Bucky Barnes’ life returns so too does the memory of the Winter Soldier’s along with all of the things he’s done. With his kill record she can see why he might be isolating himself.

“He asked about you, actually.” Steve mentions. The way he says it, with pause and softness worries her.

“Oh yeah? He getting tired of the sausage fest?”

Steve scoffs at her over the phone. “We’re not that bad.” She can hear him fiddling with something, probably his notebook. “No, he asked if you were coming back. I think he thinks you left because of him.”

That’s stupid, she as much as tells him.

“Yeah, I know. He’s just confused. Sam thinks maybe he’s filling in the blanks in his past with stuff from recent memory.”

“What do you mean?” Steve is obviously troubled by whatever’s been going on back in New York.

“He keeps insisting that he knows you.”

He does, she points out because that’s pretty obvious, this isn’t news Cap.

“No, not like that. He says he knows you from before. Before D.C. and before Odessa.”

Now that’s a new development.

“But he doesn’t.” Steve says sternly. “If you knew him you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.” The road to Steve Rogers’ trust had been a painful one; Natasha doesn’t want to lose it.

=

One of Coulson’s people had nearly been a casualty of war.

Natasha had never met Leopold Fitz before but she had heard of him and was familiar with his work; he had been behind her improved widows bite gauntlets.

He wakes from his coma and has trouble with his small motor skills. This they are sure he can overcome with time and rehabilitation. The real problem is the memory loss he wakes with.

At first they think it’s just disorientation, but after days of no improvement most of the team admits the truth to themselves.

Simmons takes it harder than the others. From what she know of them, that they were always together at the academy, top of their class, a lot of people thought that FitzSimmons was one person, Natasha knows Simmons isn’t about to give up.

The situation reminds her enough of Steve trying to help Bucky get his memories back that Natasha both sympathizes and is freaked out by the reminder of Bucky’s insistence on knowing her.

The more she thinks about it the more she doubts herself.

She doesn’t remember ever knowing him before, but there’s a lot that she doesn’t remember.

=

Coulson asks her to help Fitz, “please talk to him, you’re the only one that knows what it’s like to not remember.”

“You’ve never tried?” Fitz asks her. They play board games and build lego to help him with controlling his hands. “Don’t you want to know though?”

Natasha tries to explain. “I wasn’t always so nice.” She smiles and shakes her head at him. He’s not going to understand. “I’ve done a lot of bad, and I don’t really need to remember what other bad I’ve done.”

Leo Fitz is full of questions, he’s easily excited and frustrated by his memory loss. He doesn’t remember work he’s done on Coulson’s team, doesn’t remember how he got hurt. His teammates are like strangers. FitzSimmons friendship is straining because of it, he can’t remember how they met or how they became friends. She’s important, Fitz says, but he doesn’t remember why.

“There could be good things though, friends and family. You might’ve done good.”

Natasha shrugs. “I guess.”

“I would want to remember.” Fitz says quietly, more to himself than to her. “I want to remember.”

=

The truly unfortunate thing, other than the other, more obvious unfortunate things, is that they no longer have the access that they used to.

SHIELD doesn’t technically exist anymore, so it’s not like they’re getting paid, there isn’t money for new tech, and they can’t go through their regular channels for information. There’s no access to the resources that SHIELD had. They don’t really have agents anymore.

It makes it kind of hard to get shit done.

“You should call in Barton.” Natasha advises, the state of things here frustrates her. “You know he’s loyal, you know he’s good.”

They can’t take down Hydra, stop and capture the escapees from the Fridge, and rebuild SHIELD on their own.

Clint would be pissed with them both for keeping Phil’s status as Alive a secret, but he would want them to be together. Strike Team Delta was like a family. Tony and Bruce were two of the greatest minds on Earth, and Tony could offer resources that they were in dire need of. She knows Steve would want to take down Hydra once and for all. Then there was Thor, the Asgardian god could be a lot of help taking down superpowered criminals.

“Why haven’t you used the Avengers?”

Phil gives her that kind of fatherly look he’s so partial to using. “Not yet.”

He will, but not yet; not until they’re really needed.

“They’ve got enough on their plate.”

“So why did Fury send me here, if you’re waiting until you need us?”

He gives her that look again, with the soft smile and the crinkle in his brow, Phil reaches over and brushes some of her hair away from her face with his knuckles. “Because you needed it, and I needed you to be okay.”

=

Jemma Simmons is brilliant, Natasha decides, brilliant and frighteningly competent.

Natasha also decides that this is one of the few people that she can trust enough to allow herself to be helped by.

That’s saying a lot, she doesn’t trust easily. But she has been with these people for months now and Simmons has been working tirelessly to help Fitz.

“I’m sorry, you want me to do what?” Stop scaring the doctors Fury had told her early on in her career as a SHIELD agent. It’s something she has to remind herself to do sometimes.

She never goes to medical on her own, she would rather tend to her own wounds than give anyone opportunity to hurt her. Doctors had plenty of opportunity to harm their patients.

There was no way of knowing how many of SHIELDs medical staff had been Hydra, but Simmons wasn’t. She isn’t a medical doctor, but she is a biologist, and she has been doing a lot of work in relation to human memory.

“I want you to run some tests on me; on my brain.”

“Yes,” Simmons winces as she says “that’s what I thought you said.”

=

There’s a Hydra cell that Fury has tracked to Prague. It’s small, but still too much for him to handle on his own.

Natasha had spent some time in Prague before SHIELD, before she even became a free agent. She remembers the mission, staying in the city and gathering intel on a traitor for her superiors. Going back there now after turning herself around is a completely different experience.

She hadn’t found the city so beautiful the last time.

The cell winds up being larger than initially thought.

Natasha makes her way through the underground base silently and thinks that it was strangely easy to find it. Fury’s been turning up Hydra bases everywhere, but there was never anything important in any of them. They hadn’t found anything useful.

Hydra had a lot of loyal soldiers and agents, and they were reorganizing under their new leader, but they weren’t all as eager to die for Hydra as they had once been.

Few of them had spat “Hail Hydra!” before biting down on a cyanide capsule.

“So old fashioned.” She says to May. “I can’t believe they still use cyanide pills, its 2014, move on.”

Melinda May hasn’t developed much of a like for banter the last few years.

They split up to cover more ground.

The narrow hallway she winds up going down is older than the rest of the base, it’s all concrete and flickering lights. Exposed pipes line the low ceiling.

The doors in the area lead to living quarters meant for whoever would have been hiding here during the war. In one room she finds a man sitting behind a desk writing in a journal.

“Romanova.” The man greets her warmly. “Ah, I suppose you don’t recognize me, it has been some time.”

“Should I?” she doesn’t take her eyes off the man, he stops writing to look up at her through reading glasses.

“I see. They’ve taken it, have they? Have you come looking for your past then?”

The way he’s looking at her is starting to piss her off. This man speaks to her like he knows her, like she was an old acquaintance he was catching up with.

“I came here looking for Hydra.”

“Yes, it is unfortunate that this is what’s become of us.” Whatever the hell he was talking about she didn’t know. Whoever _they_ were or _us_ was she had no idea, but he seemed willing to talk. “Taking down Hydra, I don’t know if I should slap you or commend you.”

“I still don’t know who you are. How do you know me?”

“Dr. Sergei Krylov, we’ve met before. I’m an old acquaintance of Karpov.”

Hearing that name made her blood run cold. Who was Karpov? Why did she know that name? Why did it make her feel sick?

“I’m sure it will come to you.” Krylov says, not unkindly. “I’m afraid I must be going now. It was good to see you again Widow. Do say hello to Ivan for me when you see him.”

Krylov gathers up his journal and raises his hand. Natasha is blown back, her head hits the filing cabinet behind her and when she comes to Krylov is gone and May is trying to hail her over the radio.

=

Natasha wakes choking and sits up to wretch into the wastebasket beside the bed. Some of it misses and ends up on her boots, some of it gets in her hair.

All she can think is _Karpov, Karpov, Karpov_ and Red.

=

The test results say there is no significant damage to be found, but Simmons tells her that she found signs that her mind has been tampered with. It looks like she’s had some kind of brain surgery. Not only that, but her blood tests come back with odd results which Simmons can’t explain.

The young scientist swears that she’ll find out what it is. She looks almost excited for a puzzle to solve.

Every night she wakes up with the image of doctors all around her and a sneering face looking down on her that she knows is Karpov.

=

While they continue to work against Hydra she starts trying to figure things out.

She digs into what past of hers that she knows of, trying to make sense of it all.

It’s when she gathers information on Krylov and Karpov that she starts getting horrible headaches. The pain is paralyzing but with the pain comes the memories.

_(hands and feet strapped down to the table, needles in her arms and burning in her veins, she screams and cries in pain but the doctors surrounding her only watch._

_after she is put in a small room, dropped on the bed to rest while her body shakes from the strain of the procedure. she had been chosen, Karpov had said, among all of the other candidates she was the best, she would change the world. she only wanted the pain to stop, she had asked for the Soldier but he was gone)_

There had been a good reason for her to spend so many years getting away from her past.

Vasily Karpov apparently died many years ago, in such a normal way that Natasha is sure that he was murdered and it was covered up.

Good riddance.

Being dead doesn’t stop him from haunting her.

The painfully resurfacing memories feel as though they just occurred and she starts having trouble telling what’s going on around her from what happened years ago in a far off place.

There are still so may blanks though and she doesn’t know how to handle the resurgence of so many much.

One morning she wakes up thinking that she’s a seventeen years old agent of the Red Room, loyal to mother Russia and her handlers.

It takes two shots from the Icer to knock her out but by then she’s already given everyone enough reason to be more wary of her.

After that she decides to leave. She doesn’t want to kill these people.

=

Natasha remembers the fire when she was a girl; a woman’s arms around her as she cried, being passed out of a broken window into the waiting arms of a soldier.

If it’s real she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know how much of anything is real, but it’s her earliest memory.

=

“Stop flapping your hands around. You’re not really a bird, Clint.”

“Tasha, what’s going on?”

“Nothing, I’m fine.”

“Nat,”

“I’m fine.”

“Everyone’s worried.”

“Well they shouldn’t be.”

=

Sergei Krylov is a former Soviet scientist. It would seem that after the collapse of the KGB many of their agents and scientists had found their way to Hydra’s employ.

For all she knew Hydra could’ve been controlling the KGB from behind the scenes all along. It seemed more likely the more she considered it.

The Red Room particularly reeked of Hydra’s influence.

Had Natasha been doing Hydra’s dirty work her entire life?

=

Doubts and questions keep running over and over in her mind along with the building anger.

Natasha drops off the grid completely; stops contact with everyone, makes her way overseas and starts gathering intel on all of the major players in the Red Room.

=

The old house, if you could really call it that, hadn’t changed much from the last time she had been there, not long before she had turned her back on everything she had been made for and faked her death.

There’s a thick layer of dust covering everything; it had been sitting empty for a few years at least, no one came in to take care of the place but it hadn’t been broken into. The furniture was still there, covered with white sheets. There was no power.

Alexei still owned the place but hadn’t bothered doing anything with it. Everything is exactly where she remembered it.

Typical, he was a stubborn ass, endearing, but stubborn. He had always avoided change. Natasha isn’t even surprised to find the bedroom closet still holding her clothes.

She hadn’t been in love her husband, hadn’t chosen him, but he had been good to her and she had grown to love him over the time they were together.

Natasha hopes he’ll stay out of whatever she might end up getting into while she’s here. If he didn’t get involved he would be kept out of her crosshairs. Alexei Shostakov as she had known him would never have worked for Hydra but a lot can change in nine years.

Built into the wall behind the desk in the study was the safe that documents on missions would be kept in. Any documents that remained would be there.

Their framed wedding photo had stood on the cabinet that hid the safe, perfectly centered. Instead she finds it lying face down on the cabinet, devoid of the dust that blanketed everything else.

Well shit, she thinks, she’s walked right into a trap.

She has enough time to glance over the note written on the glass of the frame before everything blows up around her.

“Dearest Natalia,” it had read “you always were the best. I regret this course of action, but you are no longer truly Natalia, know that you have been mourned.”

=

=

When Natasha comes to she’s lying in a bed wearing pajamas and she’s been patched up. There’s an IV stuck into the back of her hand and there is a change of clothes sitting folded on the table at the end of her bed. She does her best to control her breathing, to keep her heart rate normal so as not to alert anyone that she’s awake, but she feels sick to her stomach.

It doesn’t matter anyway, the door opens and someone enters.

“Ivan.” She tries to say when she sees him but all that comes out is a croak. Her mouth and throat are dry and all she can taste is blood.

He pours her a cup of water from the pitcher on the table and she eagerly drinks it.

She drinks too much too fast and ends up vomiting into the bedpan he’s placed in her lap. There’s not much to get out though, after the water and stomach acid she can’t stop dry heaving over the bedpan. Her hair is plastered to her face and Ivan pushes it back for her.

Natasha manages to say his name, it sounds like a weak whisper to her own ears.

“It’s alright now Natashenka, you’re home.”

She wants to throw up again.

=

Natasha’s wounds have healed abnormally fast since Karpov had gotten his hands on her, but she’s laid up in bed anyway; hooked up to all sorts of machines. The bed is comfortable, blanket soft, Ivan checks on her often to make sure she’s alright.

At first glance the room looks like any other hospital room: awful fluorescent lights, a paper curtain to the side of the bed, furniture on wheels for ease of movement, a vase of flowers on the table with the water.

On closer inspection she can see everything that screams that she is a prisoner here. There are no windows, the door is heavy and can’t be opened from the inside; the flowers are bugged.

There must be something in the IV or water that’s keeping her so calm and compliant.

They had kept her in a gilded cage before, Natasha knows better now. He may be acting the doting father but that’s all it was, an act. He hadn’t been that man in a very long time.

“Vanya,” she asks when next he checks on her “how long was I unconscious?”

“It doesn’t matter” he says, tucking the blanket around her more snugly “you’re awake now and you’ve come home.”

She isn’t home though, this isn’t home, she doesn’t even know where this is, she thinks.

“Now, let’s take a look at those wounds.”

=

It feels like it’s taking an abnormally long time for her to heal, it must be the drugs. They’re making her head foggy.

=

When she can finally move again it is with quite a bit of pain. Her left side is essentially a giant bruise with a few broken up spots of uninjured flesh. There are plenty of scratches on her face and hands from what must have been broken glass. It feels like her pelvis is bruised, the ring finger and pinky of her left hand are both broken.

The worst of it is her abdomen and left thigh. Something must have nearly gone through her leg. Her abdomen is heavily bandaged; the wound has reopened more than once when she moved to quickly. Ivan had said that there was a long gash across her belly.

She hadn’t even been this badly hurt when she fought the Chitauri.

The thought that she might not get out of this keeps creeping up on her.

Ivan brings in doctors she doesn’t know to inspect her injuries and check her progress, they make tutting noises at her and take notes and whisper to one another.

There shouldn’t be so many doctors for something so simple as this. It’s clear to Natasha that they are here for more than overseeing her recovery.

It’s possible he’s waiting for her to heal before punishing her for her betrayal, but knowing Ivan it’s more than that. He had invested years in her upbringing, raised her and cared for her. He had been the only father she had ever known. The Red Room had changed him from the caring father into something possessive and vengeful. He’ll want to have her back under control.

He would want to use the Black Widow as the Red Room had before.

Ivan will set her against what remains of SHIELD as revenge, have her kill her friends and allies as punishment.

She won’t do it.

=

The only exit is the door, which is locked and guarded at all times.

Natasha slips the needle for the IV out of her hand when no one is looking and puts it halfway in and plays along when she hears the door.

If she had to guess she would say she’s been here for just under two weeks, give or take. There’s no way to tell for sure and no one will tell her.

She pretends to knock the vase over while pouring herself some water. It falls and the porcelain shatters when it hits the ground. She hides one of the sharp pieces under her mattress and waits for a chance.

The best way to escape is to be patient. She knows they will move her when they think she’s fit for reeducation. That will be her chance.

By now the Avengers will be looking for her. She hopes, at least. Clint and Steve will likely have already started, and if James’ memories really had been returning he would be looking too, but she can’t just sit and wait for a rescue here. Looking doesn’t mean finding and she doesn’t know how long she has.

=

Opportunity strikes, finally, when they send for the guard to bring her to the theatre. They foolishly only send the one guard. She strikes once his back is to her in the corridor, strangling him from behind with the plastic IV tube.

It’s unlikely she’ll have time to hide him and dress herself in his uniform so she settles for relieving the man of his weapons. She double checks that he’s dead before moving on.

At this point she really doesn’t need him turning up later.

She has to move carefully to avoid the cameras, sticking close to the walls.

Outside of the room that she had been kept in the place is practically in ruins. It’s clear that they only maintained it enough to be functional. Some of the lights are broken and the security cameras are twenty years old at least.

They look like the ones that had been set up at the Red Room facility, in fact, the whole place looks like - Jesus, Natasha nearly spits, she’s in the Red Room facility.

Ivan had literally brought her “home” to the damned Red Room.

She’s living a nightmare. Even if she gets out of the building she’s stuck in the middle of nowhere.

The fucking Ural mountains? Really?

Natasha reviews her options. “Shit, Plan B.”

=

The government had sold most of the equipment at the facility after it had been shut down, whatever operation they were running here had to have been a recent thing.

The main security room is shamefully easy to get into. The man just inside the door raises his gun when she slips into the room. Natasha gets behind him and wraps her arm tightly around his throat, maneuvering him and using him as a human shield against the other man. She twists his arm and gains control over the gun in his hand, forcing him to shoot the other man just below the chin. When he drops dead she grabs hold of her shield by the chin and forehead and violently wrenches his head around. A strangled cry later and she has control of the buildings security.

They had yet to update it,

“Aw, floppy drive.” You didn’t see those anymore.

They were under manned. There was no way this was a Hydra op.

By the look of it Ivan was growing impatient in the theatre. The guard should have gotten her there already. There were a few other people with him, setting up the chair.

So he was going to wipe her after all; alter her again.

How many times had this been done to her?

There were five people in the theatre, including her dear Vanya, two standing guard at the theatre entrance, four patrolling the grounds outside, two just inside the entrance to the building and another, scientist type, in one of the offices.

Fourteen in total, it wouldn’t normally be a problem but she can still barely move.

The dead guards radio crackled to life, on the black and white monitor in front of her Ivan was holding a walkie to his face and gesturing angrily. “She’s out! The Widow has escaped! Don’t let her out of the building.”

The element of surprise was officially lost.

She may be injured and outnumbered but Natasha had grown up in this place, she knew every nook and cranny of it by heart.

The best way to get around unseen was the narrow access tunnels meant for maintenance.

Natasha grabs the baton off of the body slumped in the chair and smashes the consoles, if they try to find her that way they won’t be able to, the system is useless now.

The tunnels are dark and filthy but easy to move around in. They span the whole building. If they thought to check them they were narrow enough that the tunnels would practically line the targets up for her in single file.

=

Five down, nine to go.

The scientist she had taken out first.

Kicking the door to his office down barefoot had sent a shot of pain through her body, it radiated in her sore abdomen, but it had caught him off guard.

He looked up from what he was inspecting, her Widows Bite gauntlets, in time for her knife to find itself imbedded in his forehead.

The two at the doors had moved further into the building to look for her, they were both young and looked nervous.

She hid in a dark alcove and waited for one to pass it.

When the girl stepped just passed Natasha she shot her left hand out and grabbed the girls’ right wrist, twisting to disarm it and ramming her right elbow into the girls’ nose.

Her nose broke and she instinctively put her hands to it to stunt the blood. As she bent forward with a muffled cry the baton cracked down on the back of her head.

The boy that had been on door duty with her heard the commotion and came running down the corridor toward it. She shot him in the head while he was running and retreated back into the tunnels.

The people patrolling outside had made their way into the building.

Natasha slipped in an out of the access tunnels and killed two more without them noticing she was behind them.

One carried a grenade, bless his heart.

Pulling the pin she let it roll down the corridor where she could hear two sets of footsteps.

Another two down.

=

Things take a turn for the worse when the reinforcements show up.

She hears them before she sees them. Alexei’s voice had always carried, he was the one barking orders at the others with him.

Shit. He was strong, the Soviet’s own attempt at recreating the super soldier. In her current state she

wouldn’t be able to take him head on. Too bad she had already used the grenade on the small fry.

=

Alexei was a large man, always had been. The serum hadn’t changed him much on that front, but then, it hadn’t been entirely successful.

The people with him were not from her days in the program. Whoever they were they were strangers to her.

It was clear that they were both better trained than the guards and more than simply human. They realize she’s in the tunnels easily, forcing Natasha to run.

She turns a corner too fast, twisting to avoid a pipe jutting out of the wall, and the long gash on her abdomen reopens. The pain is nauseating.

Behind her they smash through the wall and two of the strangers give chase down the narrow passage, they force her to duck out at the next exit, where Alexei is waiting for her.

Natasha raises her arms just in time to deflect the blow that would have knocked her out.

“Hi honey.” She slides around him smoothly. “Fancy meeting you here.”

He looks angry. “Natalia.” His companions were making their way toward them, trying to surround her.

Natasha sidesteps the punch that had been aimed at the back of her head by one of the strangers and grabs the arm, using the assailants’ momentum to throw the woman over her, she lands on her side with a grunt. Still holding the woman’s arm she puts her heel to her shoulder and wrenches the joint out of place.

“Laynia.” The other stranger shouts as the woman shrieks. He tackles Natasha away from her and into the concrete wall. Hooking her foot around his leg, she trips him and swings out with the baton as he makes he falls. He goes down surprisingly fast.

The pain in her stomach was already excruciating, she could feel the bandage soaking through, when someone hits her with something in her waist.

Her vision blurs and she falls to the ground shaking. Around her there’s angry shouting.

They must think she’s really down for the count because they’ve all got their backs turned to her to check on their injured.

Vaguely insulting as it was, it gives her the chance to slip away. It takes all of her strength to stay quiet.

Her window of opportunity is small; she would have to work fast.

There had been an entrance into the level below not far. She would have to climb down the ladder but she could find something of use there. Hopefully a stockpile of explosions to blow the whole place sky high.

=

“Yay.” Natasha mumbles to herself, her voice comes out too rough for her liking. There was, in fact, a musty old case in a storage room that had a serviceable amount of Semtex.

She could stock up here, there were flares and ammo and assault rifles that would have been of great use earlier on in her day. “Why didn’t I come down here before?”

After redressing her wounds and gathering supplies she goes to set her charges. If she manages to get out in time she would find whatever transportation Alexei and his people had used to get there and get away from this nightmare.

If not, at least she could take this place down with her.

An hour should be enough time to get out, if she wasn’t captured or didn’t bleed to death first.

=

Clint had gone on a rant about plans always going to shit in the movies. How just when it looks like things are going your way, that’s when they go wrong.

The Hope Spot, he had called it.

Well she had had hers, and with a half an hour until the place was set to blow she finds herself surrounded and strapped down to the chair in the operating theatre.

They had gassed her to knock her out from afar.

“Are you badly injured?” Ivan asks as the other doctors tightened the restraints. “We’ve worked very hard to bring you back here.”

“Soon you will be back to your old self.” Alexei interrupts him.

“What,” she spits at them “you going to erase my memories so I’ll be a good little girl?”

“It’s been done before and it will be done again if it must.” She could see they were growing impatient with her. “Natashenka, my dear, I do this for your own good. Just bite down on this and try to relax.”

This was really it then, she was going to die in the place that she had spent so long running from. If she didn’t have the bite guard in her mouth she would have laughed at the irony. Or cried. Maybe both.

Hopefully the bombs would go off before the machine started. Natasha wanted to die as herself.

There was the whirring and clicking of the machine warming up and the sound of a far off explosion.

Good, she thought and glared up at Ivan, time’s up.

=

Shouting all around her.

=

An irritating beeping nearby, muffled sounds at her sides. Her eyes open a sliver before shutting again.

It’s too bright.

That god awful beeping seems like it’s never going away.

=

When Natasha finally wakes up she almost screams in frustration. She’s back in that room again. They must have escaped and now Ivan is going to come in and tell her that she is home.

Then there’s a pleasant voice above her followed by a concerned face and a hand on her cheek.

“Agent Romanoff? Can you hear me? You’re safe. It’s Dr. Simmons, we’ve got you now.”

Words like _We’ve got you now_ are usually much more menacing.

There isn’t anything menacing about the presence above her.

Safe, she thinks before losing consciousness again.

=

Moments, or hours, or days later her eyes open again. She can’t tell how long it’s been, she’s in and out and everything is cloudy. But she forces herself to stay awake because there are people in the room; a lot more than she thinks is strictly allowed at once.

No one’s going to try to kick the Avengers out of a hospital room though.

“It’s alive.” Tony exclaims with levity when she makes a small sound. All she can manage at this point is to roll her eyes at him; even that hurts.

They all look tired and a little worse for the wear. She would tell them that they all look like shit but Natasha’s perfectly aware that she looks ten times worse.

“Shut up, Tony.” Someone outside of her line of sight says.

Natasha clears her throat. “Give it to me straight doc.”

No one responds to her quip, poor as it was she thought that it deserved at least a grin. Tough crowd. “So, you guys just going to just stand around pouting?” This gets a reaction at least, an angry one.

Steve’s lips are pressed so tightly together that they’ve gone white. “You – ” it’s all he can get out. He’s pointing at her and trying for words but there aren’t any. She’s never seen him struggle to put a sentence together. Steve settles for shaking his head at her and storming out of the room.

“Nat.” Clint says disapprovingly from her right.

=

There’s a stuffed toy monkey beside her bed.

“From Fitz,” Coulson says “he loves monkeys.” She does seem to recall him mentioning that once or twice.

It’s cute. She’ll cuddle it when no one can see.

=

Usually it’s the other way around: Clint lying in a hospital bed and Natasha sitting nearby keeping him company.

“Weird, right?” his feet are on her bed “I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.”

She does her best to shift in the bed but it’s no use, he has to raise the back section and fluff the pillow. “How did you guys find me?”

“Zombie-Coulson contacted us – I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Coulson, by the way – and told us what was going on before you went AWOL. We had trouble tracking you but Bucky thought you’d look for Ivan so we tracked him and his people down to the old KGB complex.”

“Not exactly KGB.” Natasha mumbled.

“Yeah well we showed up and saved your ass just before the bombs went off.”

“Ivan and Alexei?”

“We think they got caught in the blast.” Natasha let out a long breath, she didn’t know how she felt about that. Even after everything, Ivan had been her only family for so long, there was a hollowness in her chest at the thought of him really being dead. “I’m sorry.”

=

Thor brings her massive amounts of pillows, blankets and food.

“Have you tried dipping French fries in a chocolate milkshake yet?” She asks him. “You have to try it; it’s so good.”

“We will go together when you are healed, Natasha.”

=

“I’m so sorry.” Steve says as soon as he sees that she’s awake from where he’s been standing and watching her sleep like a small child for over an hour, Simmons tells her later.

She has no idea what he’s talking about.

As the eloquent, well trained, multi-lingual person that she is she stumbles over a “What?” because is he apologizing to her?

“I, uh,” he scratches the back of his head and looks at her earnestly “I shouldn’t have left like that the other day; and I shouldn’t have been mad at you in the first place.”

“Oh.”

Steve takes her hand in his; it’s as abnormally warm as he always is. “I was worried. Everyone was worried. Bucky had all these resurfacing memories. I thought you lied about knowing him. I didn’t even think that you might not remember. I’m so sorry. I should have trusted you – I do trust you.” His head ducks down. “We couldn’t find you and I was worried something had happened. You almost died and I didn’t even know.”

“Sorry.” What else could she even say? He was still holding her hand. “I forgive you for having irrational feelings.” She says to him magnanimously, Steve huffed. “Now give us a kiss.”

That made him let out an actual laugh and he bent over to kiss her forehead.

“Hey, so did you call Sharon while I was gone?”

=

Simmons tells her to stay in bed. “You’re on bed rest. Healing from horrible injuries. Lie down right now.”

It’s just that she was on bed rest when she was prisoner too, so she’s been doing a lot of lying in bed being bored.

The farthest she manages to sneak away is halfway to the hanger before she’s caught by a stern faced biochemist.

=

“Hi.” He says from the threshold.

“Hi.” She says back from her bed.

Her lips quirk into a shy smile, so unlike her but it’s the first time she’s spoken to James with both of their memories intact, she’s not sure how to proceed. They’re not the same people they were all those years ago, but they aren’t the same people they had been a few months ago either.

He smiles back at her though and shimmies his way to her bedside, when he holds her hand and brushes his lips across her bruised knuckles she thinks it doesn’t matter who they were before, they’re both here now and that’s enough for her.

=

=

Finally, after being stuck in bed for longer than she thought necessary, Natasha walks out on her own two legs, in clothes that aren’t pajamas or sweats and no one tries to stop her.

There’s no guard, no father figures, no worried doctors trying to stop her.

Freedom, at last.

She heads right for the kitchen, where she finds Clint and Coulson waiting with freshly made coffee.

“It’s insensitive, that’s what it is.” Clint’s saying to their old handler. “Stupid and mean, and stupid.”

He must be talking about Coulson not telling him he wasn’t dead anymore, the older man has his hands clasped in front of him and his head turned slightly, you would never think he was the director of SHIELD by looking at him.

“Sorry.”

“You owe us.”

“Oh, he definitely owes us.” She agrees and steals Clint’s coffee from his hand. “Clint wore a suit to your funeral and everything.”

Phil takes a deep breath in and lets it out with sagging shoulders. “Alright, alright.” He sighs and takes his suit jacket off, hanging it carefully on the back of Natasha’s chair.

It could be the music that draws everyone to the room, it could also be the laughter or the smell of food, whatever it is, they’re joined in the kitchen by the others. First is Thor, who may or may not have the preternatural ability to find food, followed by Skye. May arrives silently after them. Fitzsimmons come in with Bruce and Tony, the group chattering amongst themselves about FitzSimmons work. Steve and Bucky join them last with Tripp, talking about his grandfather.

“What’s going on?” Steve asks. Bucky sits in the chair next to Natasha and grins at her.

“Phil’s making waffles.” She replies and throws a strawberry at him.

At the counter, in the apron with the SHIELD logo on it, Phil waves at them with the whisk.

Being a SHIELD agent, Phil was good at keeping secrets, so no one had ever found out his secret ingredient. “Is it love?” Tony asks “I bet its love.”

Phil’s not telling, it’s a family recipe. Complete bullshit, Natasha had said once, family recipe her ass, but she didn’t press the matter because he might stop making them.

“Oh my god.” Skye says with a mouth full of waffles. “These are the best waffles I’ve ever had in my life.”

Captain America loves his waffles, Phil feels like he’s floating on air. “I’d like to make you breakfast – no, I mean – I could make more if you’d like.”

May snickers over her plate and Phil turns back toward the counter where she’s leaning. “Why does everything I say come out wrong?” He whispers to her with a red face.

“Why would anyone eat anything other than breakfast food?” Clint asks over the table.

Natasha shrugs in reply instead of saying anything. She’s on her second helping with whipped cream and strawberries piled atop her waffle beautifully.

“Pizza.” Tony says as if it’s the obvious be-all end-all of food. It starts a team-wide argument over which is the best food.

They seem to bicker over the smallest things but right now Natasha doesn’t mind.

She’s got her boys, her team, her memories, and her waffles. Right now, things are good.

**Author's Note:**

> I think this is the longest story I've ever finished. I'm not really sure about the characterization of Ivan and Alexei, I decided to go the "Serum drives them crazy" route with them.


End file.
